


Free Will

by eluna



Series: Subvert All The Tropes [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Codependency, Consent Issues, Doubt, Falling Angels, Free Will, Gen, Heaven, Implied Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, POV Anna Milton, Pre-Apocalypse, Pre-Series, Pre-Slash, Soul Bond, Soulmates Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Trope Subversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-17
Packaged: 2018-10-06 17:58:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10341141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: "This vessel," Naomi says, flexing its arms experimentally, "was the obstetrician of Mary Winchester during her first pregnancy in 1978. One month ago, Mary conceived her second child, and this babe and his elder brother are to be bonded."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Subverting the trope of soul bonds/soulmates. Part three in a loose series of otherwise-unconnected, trope-subverting stories.
> 
> It's always bothered me that the show doesn't clearly address what exactly makes Sam and Dean soulmates, or the difference between soulmates and cupid's arrow victims, and I'm even more bothered by the loss of free will that accompanies being struck by a cupid. This fic is my twisty response.

Naomi has taken a human vessel. The white woman she is wearing is short and soft, with no wings and only one face, and Anna inexplicably is—thinks—she can't pin down just what it is that she is thinking, cannot put it to words, and _that_  is strange, although it has been happening more and more these last years. But she supposes that she might dislike this, hovering before Naomi in her vague and various forms as her senior tugs down the sleeves of her vessel's stiff wool suit, even without a rational reason _to_ dislike it.

With a tight smile, Naomi ushers her into the bright office and stands to greet her when Anna shifts inside. Anna towers over her, wondering at the physics of it: she is inside of the room, yet _bigger_  than the room, and can feel her essence extending many, many floors above and below it. Her energy seeps under the cracks of many heavens' doors, and Anna can detect the thoughts of those souls, sense the foreign depths of what they feel—perhaps not so foreign as Anna may expect. _Feel_ —

"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Anna."

Snapping to attention, Anna presses herself into a waveform of malleability. "Of course, Naomi," she rumbles. "Congratulations on your new vessel. I had not known that any angel had cause to appear on Earth this century."

"Ordinarily, it's only the cherubs and other lower orders who do—those soldiers whom we adopted from outside the Abrahamic faiths. This is an integral year, however, and I find it easier to collect intelligence from within the humans' social structures. This vessel," Naomi says, flexing its arms experimentally, "was the obstetrician of Mary Winchester during her first pregnancy in 1978."

Anna has heard the name Winchester before, when the cherubs received the order to tie Mary and the man, John. She thinks there may have been other Winchesters struck by cherubs before, but cherub archery is not a practice that Anna closely follows, and she cannot be sure how far that line may extend. "Pardon me, ma'am, but the Winchester child cannot be old enough to take a partner, and even if he were, wouldn't a cherub…?"

"You're quite correct, Anna, but our concern for the boy is not one of archery. One month ago, Mary conceived her second child, and this babe and his elder brother are to be bonded."

Something hot and unpleasant flushes over Anna. "I am afraid that I do not understand."

Naomi smiles again, a chilly thing. "Soul bonds—soulmates—we create with rare Enochian magic that cherubs cannot access. I myself have never performed the ritual—too unclean—but you, Anna, have done so once before. Have you forgotten?"

The corner of some old, old memory peels up into Anna's awareness. "I vowed never again," she states, her waves spiking. "After that man—"

"I personally dealt with the cherub responsible for the botched arrow," says Naomi, suddenly all bite and venom. "The rape of the man by his tied was an unfortunate accident that _your_  soul bond corrected beautifully, as I recall."

"It corrected nothing. For Levi to be bonded to the one who caused him such trauma—and for what? What purpose did it serve to bind two men who could not procreate?"

"Are you questioning the function of our cherubs?"

"I—" But Anna pauses, watching Naomi's darkly amused eyes. Questioning leads to doubt, and _doubt_ … "I am merely uncomfortable with the responsibility of performing another soul bond— _any_  other soul bond, let alone one upon such impressionable children, one of them yet unborn—after my first attempt. It is kind of you to call it a success, but I do not believe that it was. We understand so little of human emotion that the old Enochian magic becomes dangerous, performed on those so different from us."

"And yet _you_ seem to understand their psychology well enough to question a direct order."

That word again. Anna thinks—no, believes— _angry_ , she suddenly realizes. She _feels_  angry. Since Anna's creation, she's been told that angels are stoic warriors—never feeling, never doubting—but this anger, it's old, and she suddenly sees it hiding behind the human lines of Naomi's new face as well. How many of Anna's brothers and sisters claim to have nothing in common with the minds of these humans merely because they lack the vocabulary to express their experiences?

Naomi is giving her that expectant, _angry_  look again, and Anna—yes, feels more than thinks, believes on some fundamental and irrational level, that disobeying in this moment will lead her into terrible trouble. "I don't suppose I understand it after all," she says, and Naomi's little pink lips curl up with anticipation.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliancy: Castiel says in Season 4 that it's been centuries (millennia?) since angels walked the Earth, but this directly contradicts the fact that cupids (a lower order of angels) have been walking around whacking people with their arrows for apparently that whole time (definitely in the 1970s-ish when John and Mary got together), as well as the irritating episode with the Victorian flashbacks in Season 12 that showed Castiel and his merry band of murderers totally failing to recognize that the one dude was not an angel and getting him and his kid killed when what that entire episode was such a plot hole in and of itself. So we're just going to go with the assumption that it was extremely _rare_ for angels _not including_ cherubs to take vessels before Season 4.


End file.
